It was no easy task getting Jane into the Tilly, either. Her old arthritic knees didn’t do any bending, and the seat in the cab was high. She couldn’t manage to stand on the running board. Louisa and I had to lift her in feet first—with our arms full of fur, it was like lifting a bear.

At last we managed it, and Louisa climbed in on my side to ride in the middle, and I climbed in behind the steering wheel. Louisa sat right up on the edge of the seat like a tiny tot so she could see over the dashboard.

“And now you are high enough to get a braw view of Windyedge as we come down the lane,” I said to them as I started up the van.

Windyedge Aerodrome sits on top of the moor above the fishing village it is named for, just south of Aberdeen. It has sat there some time, built before the Great War, in the early days of flying. About it runs a proud stone wall, with its good looks all ruined by a high wire fence topped off with barbs. The road follows the wall for a mile and a half, past lookout towers and bunkers for antiaircraft cannons. The other side of the road is all wind-bent hedge and fields and wild woodland.

I drove through this drearysome landscape as I’d done a hundred times before, one hand resting on the gear stick and the other lightly steering as we passed along the narrow lane. The road was dry, and the clouds seemed far away, high and rippling, a sky like a wide sheet of gray river pearls.

One black spot floated low over the North Sea like a fly on my windscreen.

I blinked.

Not a spot: an aeroplane. Such a totsy wee speck before it became frightening: before I knew how close it was going to get to me.

“That’s a German plane,” said Louisa.

“Don’t be daft!” I said. “It’s coming in to land.”

“I don’t know what kind it is,” she told me. “But I can tell them apart. I was in London all through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.”

The plane had wings like blunt butcher’s knives, not the tapered wings of our Hurricanes and Spitfires. It screamed in low over our heads.

“That’s a German plane,” the lass Louisa insisted. “It’s a German fighter.”

“They’d be shooting at it if it was a German plane,” I said uneasily. “See the watchtower? There are guards there, with machine guns. There’s an antiaircraft battery just below them that you can’t see from here, and another at the edge of the cliffs.”